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Wednesday, 24 June 2015

Wednesday Worktable - Wednesday 24th June - More About the Leather Journals

This is my contribution to WOYWW (What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday), over at JuliaDunnit's Blog. Each Wednesday, Julia invites fellow crafters and bloggers to show a photo or two of their worktables, and explain what they've been doing.

This week I've at least managed to get my post written on the right day of the week (after two late Thursday posts)! However, my desk looks increasingly more scary, as I haven't had time to tidy up; the stuff just gets "pushed back" and new tools and materials put in the newly-created gap.

My plan chest/ work surface... What a mess!

To the left are some attempts at the new Origami Bows, that are so popular just now. The largest is my first attempt, which wasn't bad, but they did improve as they went along, so that I'm quite pleased with them. More practice needed, I think, to perfect them.

In the middle are various bits and pieces that I was using to make leather journals.

You may have seen last week's post, about two leather journals I was working on...

The two pieces of leather, from last week...

Here they are now, on my little table, almost completed.

This is the cream leather journal. It is now bound into its cover and has a gold loop-and-button fastening. I have also painted the edges of the cover in gold.

The cover is lined with a dandelion patterned Italian paper, with an ivory background, printed in gold and a green-grey colour. The pages are my favourite, beautiful crisp cream text paper. There is one section of paper, with forty pages. It's stitched with a very soft mossy green linen thread, to echo the green-grey of the lining paper.

This is just about finished - it just needs to be under weights for a while, so it will sit flat and open nicely. Then it will be in my shop, for sale.

This is the duck-egg blue journal - you can see the beginnings of the cover in the photo from last week. I had cut the leather and painted the feather onto it. Since then, I've added the piece of wine-coloured suede leather, for a beautiful contrast with the duck-egg of the leather.

You can see that I had to hold it with a finger, to get a good front-cover shot, as it keeps springing open. I'm trying to decide if it needs a fastening - we will see how "springy" it still is, after a while under weights.

Covers are lined with a rather wonderful paper, printed with a marbled design. I love how the colours echo my choices of leather and suede. You can also see that the suede strip is folded over, as an edging on the inside of the flap, as well as on the outside.

The book has two sections of paper, which I bound with a cross-stitch design, in a plum-coloured linen.

Here is the painted feather, next to the suede strip. There is a plum colour under the gold of the feather, so it all goes so beautifully together. I'm very pleased with this book.

Close-up of the feather - can you see the plum-coloured background in this shot?

Anyway, this is my work area today. Seriously messy, but with some good stuff happening. Hopefully I will have some time free in a few days' time, to have a good tidying up session in the studio!

That's my contribution for this week. I hope you'll come back and visit again soon. When you've finished browsing around on my blog, do return to Julia's Stamping Ground, to see what's going on elsewhere this week.

I'm sorry I missed this before, Lizzy - what absolutely stunning work! They are absolutely gorgeous... the beautiful feather, and the white one with the gold edge... all fabulous! They are very unusual too - I've never seen anything like them before.

Off to explore some more of your blog - if the 2 posts I've seen so far are anything to go by, you're a very talented lady!!